320 by 240 pixels

Today I had the opportunity to visit one of the polling stations in the Kaliningrad region. There was a demonstration of video surveillance that will be used in future elections.

For people who are not computer-savvy, everything seems to be beautiful, but I was surprised that the quality of broadcasting for TV viewers from the polling stations will be only 320 by 240 points - that is, even worse than what is recorded on current phones, but at the same time it will be recorded on laptop hard drive with a resolution of 640 by 480, and this is more or less acceptable quality. Rostelecom can understand: if you broadcast video of higher resolution, you can shut down the entire Internet in the country.

Let's now see how much this equipment that was used costs:

— two Logitech video cameras, the maximum market price of which is approximately 800 rubles;

— a laptop costing no more than 11,000 rubles;

— there was a modem or router (knowledgeable people said that there was a DIR-320), it costs 1,100 rubles;

- plus work, even 3 thousand, I don’t know for what.

The total amount is about 16,700 if you go and buy it in a store. Now imagine that there was an order for 98,000 PECs - that turns out to be 98,000 laptops, the same number of modems (routers), 196 thousand cameras. That is, here we have a mega wholesale price, and all the above prices can be reduced by 1/3. It turns out that the cost of video surveillance in one area does not exceed 12 thousand rubles.

And now the most important thing: if 14 billion rubles are divided into 98 thousand plots, then it turns out approximately 150 thousand rubles per plot. I very much doubt that the site, server, broadcast and other technical details will cost the remaining 12 billion rubles.